Author Comments

Mineral Rush: Runes Zero is a game where you have to mine to find minerals, you then smelt your ores with coal. And you can buy and smith equipment to mine more efficient. You sacrifice rocks for runes for power ups, and finish quests.

The Barbarian Paulous is jealous of your mining skills, so watch your health.

Will you ever defeat him?

Reviews

Rated 4 / 5 stars2015-01-08 11:02:38

This is a stupid, pointless game, and I can't stop playing it. Seriously.

I clicked on this game thinking it would be just a boring little game that I could use to kill time waiting for a download to finish. That was more than 12 hours ago and I'm still playing. It's seriously addicting. There's an actual challenge of sorts, and actual resource management is required or else you'll end up screwed six ways to Sunday. The art is simplistic, which doesn't really matter in this case because you'll be too focused mining to care. Sure, the gameplay consists of nothing more than "click the same rocks for a few minutes, then turn the rocks/ore into stuff so you can mine more stuff", but that's what makes it addicting.

Granted, I do have some problems with the game, mainly two: The inability to mute the sound effects (as the same stock noise of balloon popping/rock breaking/bell ringing/etc. get real grating after a few minutes), and the health potions. The fact that the health potions increase in price the more upgrades you get from the blacksmith is SUPREME bullshit, and since you can't increase your maximum health in any way or how much health each potion heals, it means that you'll very quickly be paying thousands of gold coins to restore 30 HP. And since the only other way to restore health is with one of the runes (which is mostly luck-based considering how low of a chance the ores connected to the rune drop) it's really infuriating. Aside from a few other nitpicks, these are really the two major complaints I have.

All things said, it's a surprisingly addictive little game. It could be better, definitely, but as it is it's pretty damn great.

Thanks for the detailed response :)
I see others are complaining about the increasing health potion price, yeah, It doesn't really make sense that the price increases by how much stuff you smith, there was a better way to do it, probably. But in the previous Mineral Rush, health wasn't even a challenge because all the numbers was multiplying except for the health prices. So you'd end up with 20,000,000 coins and it costs like 100 to restore health fully, not really balanced.

Rated 3 / 5 stars2014-09-09 13:29:42

This version is both better and worse than the previous version. It's better because of the added content like quests and the ability to actually use your stone for something. It is worse because of the health potions increasing in price. I understand that it's a balancing thing to make the end game not super easy but it needs to be worked on so that it doesn't make the start of the game super slow, it was already slow in the first version of the game anyway. Possible solutions include lowering the multiplier of your stats that increases the price of the potions or maybe changing it from a multiplier based on your stats to a tier system where the cost of the potions are 30 gold until you reach 50 total stats then double the price, then maybe keep it at 60 gold until you reach 150 total stats and double it again to 120, so on and so forth.

The mining itself is annoying. I can understand why you might have made it that way, the moving rocks would help to prevent people from botting the game, but it also is annoying for people that play the game without such things because we have to constantly move around chasing these rocks around the screen. Last I checked chasing rocks is not an activity that is part of mining. I think a better way to do it would be to make the mineral drop rates slightly different for different rocks (not much maybe just like a 1 or 2% difference) but the rocks stay in place. That would allow us to click a single rock if we wish but still give us incentive to check out all the rocks for slightly better odds of finding certain minerals. I mean in mid/late game when you have like 11,000 copper ore and 0 tin you are like "Wow, I have 11k copper I can't do anything with, what a waste."

Game has lots of potential, I search high and low for games like this where you get raw materials and actually use them for something like crafting weapons and armors and stuff rather than just selling them for money or something. With further development and tweaking it could be a great game, right now I would just say that it's a nice game but not really that good.

Rated 3 / 5 stars2014-09-07 23:28:37

This is a good game, but the mining portion is really boring. I liked the upgrades and the quests, and I thought the earning/spending power was nicely balanced, but GOD did I dread having to mine! I finally decided that it wasn't worth my time to spend 10+ minutes mindlessly clicking random spots to have 5 minutes of genuine gameplay. Honestly, it would be more enjoyable if I could just click repeatedly for 10 minutes; at least I'd be able to watch a movie or do something interesting while I was waiting to get back to the interesting part of this game!

Rated 2 / 5 stars2014-05-17 16:12:36

Rated 3.5 / 5 stars2014-04-24 10:45:21

Damn good game, a bit of an issue is that when I try to mine now half the screen is white and makes the game lag like crazy, other than this it is a pretty good game. Need more like it! The challenging aspect of the varying health potion prices makes it interesting to keep ahead.